May 24, 2007
Bringing it home: Class helps students integrate international experiences
Class Title: CHID 498A/Nursing 445C, “Bringing it Home: Integrating International Experiences,” taught by Britt Yamamoto and Josephine Ensign.
Description: This course helps UW students face the challenge and great opportunity of coming home from study and travel abroad, and helps them process their experiences on an individual and then community level. It provides a forum for these students to process the “reverse culture shock” they experience upon their return to the United States from immersion experiences of at least three months within the past year. Local and global civic engagement, social justice and communicating the significance of their time overseas are some of the issues the course helps students address as they “bring it home.”
The instructor says: “A class like this, not just at the UW but really all over North America, is unique,” said Yamamoto, a lecturer in the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) program who earned his doctorate in geography from the UW. “There’s a big push, of course, to get students to study abroad, but there is rarely anything there for them when they come back,” he said.
With thousands of UW students going abroad every year, the need for a class to help students process and then come to terms with what they’ve learned is acute, he said. The class works not only on internalizing and processing these experiences, but applying them locally.
“The main goal is to provide an arena for students who’ve been abroad and had transformative experiences, to come back to [the] UW and to begin to process that experience, not only on an individual level, but with others as well, who had similar transformative experiences abroad,” he said.
The course’s title, Bringing It Home, is indicative of what Yamamoto wants his students to learn.
“The ‘it’ is different for every student, of course, but the idea is that they’ve had some kind of experience overseas that has given them a radically different view of the world and the many different ways that the world works,” he said. “This course helps them to hold that, to be able to process it, but then also to really bring it home and take off with it…that big leap forward, so to speak.”
Unexpected Experiences: Yamamoto said he enjoys seeing the students in his class, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and study abroad destinations, connect over the shared experiences they’ve had.
“All of these students come together and they recognize that they share this same kind of process…[it] is pretty remarkable, and it’s a really wonderful group of students in this class too, that are willing to share and engage and build a community around that, because they share this common experience of being overseas and having to come back,” he said.
Students say: “The class provided an amazing outlet for small group discussion and reflection,” said Jessica Hoylman, a senior majoring in political communication with a CHID minor. After a year spent studying abroad in Sydney, Australia, Hoylman wanted to better understand what she had gone through in her return home.
“The course allowed me to start exploring many emotions I had been afraid to acknowledge from my abroad experience and helped me to gain more appreciation for my own writing style,” she said.
“This course is extremely valuable to those who are tiring of many of the writing processes in college and want a creative outlet in which to express some very powerful emotions that living and traveling abroad often invokes.”
Reading list: Along with a required text, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: a Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, by Paul Rogat Loeb, students read articles along the lines of “Distance and Direction,” by Judith Kitchen; “To Hell with Good Intentions,” by Ivan Illich; and “A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” by Margaret Pusch.
Assignments: In addition to weekly readings, lectures, discussions, presentations and guest speakers, students devote about 30 hours over the quarter to a service learning project with a local nonprofit that helps connect their interests with academic or professional aspirations. The three-credit class will be offered again in the fall, with new sections tentatively known as Global Interest Groups (or ‘GiGs’), including the original service learning component and “professionalization” and research sections that will function more like internships.
More information this course can be found on the course Web site: http://courses.washington.edu/bithome
Class Notes is a column devoted to interesting and offbeat classes at the UW. Compiled by UWeek Intern Will Mari
